Poultry processing facilities that prepare poultry (“birds”) for delivery to grocery stores and to other consumers of processed foods receive live birds from transport vehicles and use a surface conveyor to begin the movement of the birds through the processing area. The first station in the processing area is the hanging station where workers lift the birds from the conveyor and hang each bird from their feet in the individual moving shackles that carry the birds in sequence to subsequent work stations in the processing plant. Each plant employs several people in this position that is generally regarded as one of the worst working positions in the plant.
At the hanging work station the workers must gather each bird and manually insert the feet of each bird in an individual moving shackle, whereby the birds hang from the shackle in a head down position. The shackles and the birds hung in the shackles continue to move in succession in an endless loop through the plant and the shackles return empty to the hanging area in the continuous process.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,108,345 an apparatus is disclosed for hanging live birds onto shackles by placing the birds onto a conveyor belt that transports the birds in succession with the shackles on a secondary belt, so that live birds would ride in succession with the shackles on a conveyor and then workers would manually place the legs of each bird into leg holders that are also moved in succession with the shackles. But the process of hanging birds still remains primarily a manual difficult task.